20190615.Business.computer games

Computer games

Unconsoled

Cloudcomputing is coming to the video-gaming business

More than 70,000 gamers, developers and publishersdescended on Los Angeles to goggle at each other’s wares and show off their ownat the Electronic Entertainment Expo (e3), which began on June 11th. This year bigpublishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix used the annual videogame jamboree toshow off previews of new games. Keanu Reeves, an actor, hyped up “Cyberpunk2077”, a hotly anticipated title in which he plays a big role.

One of the most significant announcements at the show was also one of the briefest. Towards the endof a two-hour presentation, Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s gamingdivision, offered a few more details about Project xCloud, Microsoft’s foray intocloud gaming. The service will be available in October, he said, before lettinggamers loose to try a demo version in the conference centre.

Cloud gaming aims to do for video games what companies like Spotify and Netflix have done for music andfilms— make them available on any device with an internet connection. For the$140bn gaming industry, that would be a revolution. The consoles and beefy pcs required to run modern games cost severalhundred dollars. Cloud gaming aims to shift the computational heavy liftinginto data-centres and to pipe the results to users over the internet. Thatwould allow gamers to play cutting-edge titles on nearly any screen with aninternet connection, no matter how feeble the underlying hardware.

Microsoft is well-placed to make cloud gaming work, says Piers Harding-Rolls of IHS Markit, a research firm. It has a 20-year pedigreethrough its Xbox series of consoles, and itsAzure cloud platform is the world’s second-biggest, after Amazon Web Services.But it is not the only tech giant interested in the idea. A few days before e3, Google, which also runs a big cloudbusiness, gave more details about Stadia, its own cloud-gaming product, whichis due to launch in November. Industry rumours suggest that Amazon is mulling asimilar business. The threat from the cloud giants helped to persuade Sony,which makes the PlayStation series of consoles, to jump into bed with itsarch-rival. It already runs a cloud-gaming service called PlayStation but in MaySony signed a deal to employ Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in its future endeavours.

It all sounds promising in theory. Whethercloud gaming will catch on, though, remains uncertain, for it is technically muchmore demanding than existing streaming services. Unlike films or music, gamesare interactive, which means they must respond instantly to a player’s input. Thelaws of physics impose limits on how quickly a player’s commands can traverse theinternet to reach a data-centre to be processed, and then how quickly theresulting video can be sent back. For the twitchy action games that dominatebestseller lists, even delays of a fraction of a second are an irritation forplayers. Such technical glitches are one reason that previous attempts at cloudgaming, by firms such as OnLive (which launched its service in 2010 but shutdown in 2015), failed to catch on.

The cloud giants insist that times have changed. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have data-centresdotted around the world, which should help keep response times low. Consumerinternet connections are faster than ever and data allowances more generous.And although dedicated gamers may turn up their noses at even short time-lags, cloudgaming could prove attractive to the less hard-core.

Cloud computing can be used in other ways, too. Rather than running the whole game remotely, oneintermediate option is to use it for tricky calculations that are also relativelyinsensitive to small delays. “Crackdown 3”, an action game released for the Xbox and pc in February, uses cloud computing for complexphysics calculations, allowing players to blow up their environment in arealistic way without overtaxing their computers. An updated version ofMicrosoft’s “Flight Simulator”, shown at e3, was also, according to its trailer,“powered by Azure”. Cloud computing has already disrupted everything from filmsto corporate it departments. Gaming, it seems, isnow also in play.